The year 2025 has been a rough one, for all the reasons, known and unknown, that I won't go into here. Everybody has their own trials and tribulations. Not EVERYTHING has been a mess this year - but I've definitely had to create my own little bubbles of success and happiness. First Campsite of 2025 Unless something unexpected happens in the next couple weeks, I'm going to finish 2025 with 22 nights out.

This weekend, if you get an escape from cloudy winter weather and happen to have clear skies, you'll have the opportunity to see one of the best meteor showers of the year - the Geminids! What makes the Geminids so great? Well, a few things: 1) Gemini, the apparent radiant point for this shower, is well above the horizon as early as 9pm.

Having recently talked about our parents' weekend with one son in West Virginia, I feel compelled to give equal billing to the other, a student at University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN. Our trip to Tennessee was similar in structure, but different in detail. First off, it takes a lot longer for us to get out to Knoxville, so on the way out we took an extra night to break up the drive.

Back in late October, my wife and I made a journey out to Morgantown, WV to visit one of the boys, currently a student at WVU. Just a few miles east of Morgantown on I-68 is Cooper's Rock State Forest, so we took the opportunity to haul our teardrop out there for a two night weekend at McCollum Campground. It turned out to be a great weekend with the boy, a not-so-great football game, and some wonderful camping and hiking in beautiful fall colors.

Some of you know that in addition to various outdoor adventures, and the flying aspect of Flying Squirrel, I'm a musician. Whether I've said this outright or you've noticed some of the background music on my YouTube videos being performed or arranged by yours truly, it's something that's always been a good artistic outlet and another necessary counter-balance to making a living as a serious individual.

I've been EXTREMELY busy over the last week or so. Something different going on every night - some things new and exciting, maybe I'll share here soon. As a delaying tactic for finishing up my story of Bones in Washington, getting videos made for that trip, and several other things... here's a quick video taken in our backyard this weekend. The starlings are migrating, and this is the noise that woke us up on Saturday. Get Out There

When we last left our heroes, they were at Diablo Lake in North Cascades National Park, marveling at the deep turquoise color in disbelief that it was actually real. By this time, lunch was calling, and so our next objective was to find a good place for that. We were stocked up for one last "brunch" of egg sandwiches, eggs and feta, etc, etc, we just needed a place to cook it.

Apologies up front here to my Canadian friends - I'm sure you see this all the time, and as I babble over a single night of reds and greens, I can only hope this is one of those things that doesn't ever get old. But when you live south of the Mason-Dixon line, seeing an aurora is noteworthy under any circumstance!

We woke up in a dense fog. The night had been fairly quiet, the South Fork of the Stillaguamish was just barely audible through the walls of the van as the temperatures dropped and the fog rolled in. As we made coffee in the cold damp, a gathering of crows (murder!) appeared on a nearby fence, the only things visible in front of a large meadow.

The night was chilly. It was the only night we actually had a normal RV power station available, so we made use of the adapter we'd brought and had an electric space heater going all night. It turned out to be very welcome, as the temperature got down to between 40 and 45 deg F. We awoke early (we had been, the whole trip, as we were still operating mostly on East Coast time).

I made a post not too long ago about a folk legend in which you can predict the severity of winter by splitting persimmon seeds. In that, I mentioned one of the other common (though not really any more accurate) methods, that being observation of a "mast year" for nut trees. It appears that my local area is having a mast year, which presumably means we're in for a hard winter.

I've had a real problem finding Comet Lemmon (C/2025 A6). It's been relatively clear, but I've had other challenges. 1) It's pretty low, so I've had challenges nailing the window between "not dark enough" and "it's below the horizon". 2) For me, the NNW direction is toward Washington, D.C. Even on the darkest nights, that horizon has a lot of light pollution.

The morning of Day 4 (Tuesday) dawned cool and foggy. It had gotten down to about 45 deg the night before, enough to prompt an extra layer in Bones to stay warm. The fog had settled into the little creek valley and plunged our campsite into low visibility mist. We'd had no more visitation or noises from coyotes, or anybody else, during the night, and we were eager to get an early start and get up to the Paradise area of Mt.

Hey All, I need to interrupt my ongoing discussion of campervan adventures in Washington state to talk about some upcoming backyard astronomy opportunities. We've got TWO marginal comets in the sky right now - one getting dimmer, and one getting brighter (but potentially lower). Neither is easy or straightforward, but worth the effort to seek. At the SAME time, we have a reliable meteor shower, the Orionids, that peak overnight from Oct.

It had already been a long day by the time we navigated the windy road down off Hurricane Ridge and traveled, once again, along the south shore of Lake Crescent. The lake is beautiful, but I was really starting to feel stuck in this one little area. We'd been back and forth along this stretch 3 times now, and it was time to strike out to new territory - after all, our reserved campsite for the night was out by the beach!

Before I get into this update, a note: Now that we were fully immersed in this trip, things got busy - so I'm going to break days into individual locations and hikes for the sake of utility and the ability to do each part justice without making these posts overly long. As is typically the case, I'll be posting video from these trips on my YouTube channel at Flying Squirrel Outdoors as well.

There's one advantage to getting up at 3am to catch an early flight from the US east coast to the west coast. Time zones work to your advantage in this direction, so you can make this trip and still arrive before local lunch time, leaving plenty of time to get a half-day in to start a trip. Of course, your body still experiences the real passage of time, so even though you might have an afternoon free - you're too exhausted to do much with it.

I had the blessed opportunity to take a week off from doom-scrolling and posting to the internet last week. We spent the time off grid, out of range of the mobile towers, exploring Olympic, Mt. Rai…

I'm late in the day here, apologies - it snuck up on me. But... Happy Pythagoras Day! If you're not tracking, let me remind you quickly of your high-school math classes. The Pythagorean Theorem says that given a right triangle - a triangle where one angle is 90-degrees, a "square" angle - if you square the lengths of the sides bordering the right angle (sides "a" and "b"), the sum of those two squared values is equal to the square of the length of the remaining side, the hypotenuse (side "c").

Today I'm recapping a short (2 mile) perimeter walk at Myrtle Point Park, in southern Maryland, highlighting some later summer/fall flora and calm river views. Late summer has been great for getting outdoors in the mid-Atlantic. Even before Labor Day, the temps were cool and the air was dry. We've seen a few days back up into the mid-80's in September, with some lingering humidity, but by and large we've had an early fall, and some trees are starting to indicate they feel it too.

Earlier in the week I wrote about one aspect of a Labor Day weekend camping trip near Hershey, PA, focusing on the butterflies at Hershey Gardens. Today I wanted to touch on the rest of the trip. We were camped at Gifford Pinchot State Park, a lovely park with lots of amenities situated around Pinchot lake. Most campground visitors seemed to be here for water-focused activities, either paddling or fishing the lake.

While we were technically camping last weekend in southern Pennsylvania, we treated our little travel trailer as a home base for day tripping in and around the Hershey, PA area. One of our stops was Hershey Gardens, perched up on a hilltop across the main road from Hersheypark, where we could see (and hear the screams from) all the rollercoasters. In contrast, Hershey Gardens is a big formal garden with some thematic collections outside, and it has a sizeable butterfly atrium inside with about 500 fluttering lepidopterans (butterflies and moths) and a few bonus animals inside, in addition to about thirty humans at a time.

This past week has been absolutely gorgeous through the Mid-Atlantic. An early glimpse of fall, the temps have been low, the humidity non-existent. There's a hint of a chill in the air, and certain trees seem to suddenly have gotten the cue to start changing color (though, this is almost certainly more due to water stress than true autumn, yet).

I just want to point out that paw paws are starting to become edible here in Maryland! These trees have a habit of having their fruit get ripe at wildly differing times, so you can find rotten paw paws and hard-as-a-rock unripe ones hanging right next to each other... but today I started finding some just slightly soft enough to take a chance on harvesting them. Good eating awaits!